There are four main areas of issues with Educational Technology which include:

• Social Issues:  Some social issues include: privacy issues such as someone using tracking devices to track your tendencies on the computer.  Health-related concerns such as hearing loss from headphones.  Fears about technology overuses, misuse such as sexting.  And the risk of malware, viruses, spam, and hacking which could be caused by spam emails.
• Educational Issues:  Some of the biggest concerns with educational issues are: a lack of technology funding caused by the recent economic struggles this country has faced.  Teacher and student accountability for quality and progress with the heavy focus on standardized test scores.  Digital literacy and digital citizenship is usually left up to the schools to create a savvy consumer of technology.
• Cultural/Equity Issues:  This is one of the more difficult issues a teacher has to deal with.  The use of technology tends to widen the gap between genders and draw a cultural line.  There is a lot of great technology out there for people with special needs, however many times a person is unable to get the technology needed to help them because of issues such as cost.
• Legal/Ethical Issues: This has to do with things such as academic dishonesty when a student takes credit for someone else’s work, or piracy of things such as music.  Other issues include preventing students from accessing cyberporn or being put at risk for hacking by an online criminal.

IS SOCIAL NETWORKING A DISTRACTION?

While social networking can be beneficial in the classroom, I see it primarily as a distraction.  Most students have smart phones, and use apps such as Twitter or Instagram.  When sitting in a class that they are not very interested in, such as biology, it is very easy for them to pull out their phones and see what their friends and family are up to.  When they pull out that phone they are missing out on valuable information, even if it is something that does not interest them.  According to NBC News 47% of students in high school and college have failed at least one course due to distractions like text messages, social media, etc.  With nearly half the student population failing a course due to these distractions it is clear the the reward is not worth the risk with social networking. One of my classmates taught that perhaps action needed to be taken to prevent such a large number of students from failing a class.  She suggested that perhaps teachers should take away the students phones at the beginning of class everyday, but I had to disagree with her because I had a teacher take away my phone everyday and that caused a bigger distraction to me than having my phone ever did.

After a few weeks I still believe that social networking is mostly a distraction.  While you could argue that there is plenty of positive affects social networking could potentially have on a classroom, I would argue that it would mostly distract students from the tasks at hand.